


One. Two. Three.

by LoveLetter



Category: Shameless (TV), Shameless (US)
Genre: Gen, No Incest, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 20:22:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/789774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveLetter/pseuds/LoveLetter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fiona was little, she secretly hated Lip and Ian...</p>
            </blockquote>





	One. Two. Three.

When Fiona was little, she secretly hated Lip and Ian. 

Lip always knew how to get attention. He wasn’t just smart for his age, he was smart for any age. When she was five and learning to read at a snail slow pace, Lip was already pointing out letters and numbers. She could feel him on her heels, close enough to make her stumble.

She liked Ian better at first. He was tiny, always smiling up at her and clutching her fingers. Ian never screamed or cried, he never begged for attention the way that Lip did. Fiona loved him because he was small and quite. When Monica left less than a year after he was born, she started to hate him for those very same reasons. Thing started to get worse after Ian was born. Fiona didn’t understand why but, she understood what a downward spiral felt like.

It wasn’t until she was six years old that Fiona stopped hating her brothers. 

Monica had disappeared, and Frank had left them on the side of some deserted road. Her ears were ringing with the sounds of Ian’s cries. He screamed for hours, but Lip stayed quiet for once. Whenever she looked back on that night she never remembers being scared. She only remembered the ache of her legs and the slippery grip of tiny fingers tangling with her own. They walked that way down the long winding road, gripping and stumbling. 

Fiona counted to three over and over again in her head until she saw the lights of the hospital. She was one, Lip was two, and Ian was three. The numbers muddled together to form a song and she clung to the melody letting it push her forward. Three became her favorite number that night, because it meant that they were all together and whole. 

The doctors had told her that Ian could have died if she hadn’t gotten him there in time. The crushing weight of those words never fully left her shoulders. She knew then that being the oldest meant being responsible. It meant keeping Ian quiet and smiling, and keeping Lip loud and knowing. 

“Make it right with Ian. You two are my rocks. I can't do it without you,” she had told Lip once. He’d avoided her eyes but she knew that he understood. They couldn’t do it without each other. 

It wasn’t until Liam was born and Monica took off again that Fiona stopped looking at Lip and Ian as weight, and started looking at them as shoulders. They were shoulders to help carry her load and shoulders to lean on. She felt it every time Ian would come home and hand her his paycheck. She felt it in the way that Lip would sit with Debbie for hours explaining homework and making her giggle. But she never felt it more strongly than when Lip walked out the door, or when she wrapped herself around Ian as they stared down at Monica’s bloody form. 

“You don’t have to do this, custody. It’s a big responsibility,” Jimmy had told her, when the kids were gone and her world was in shambles. 

“Lip will help, and Ian.” His words didn't mean anything, because he was giving her an option when there never was one. Not for her, not for the oldest Gallagher children. 

It was easy to forget that she wasn’t actually a mother of five. Lip and Ian were good at reminding her though, making her feel young and needy. The numbers one, two, three still rang through her mind sometimes. She still liked to count them out to remind herself that they were together and whole. If Ian and Lip were by her side she could push forward, make it down even the darkest winding road.

**. . .**

It took Lip a long time to get used to Debbie after she was born.

He never really had to get used to Ian because they were so close in age. He didn’t remember a time when Ian wasn’t there, and if he did he would have tried to forget it. Lip always liked his place between Fiona and Ian. It felt comfortable and easy. 

He tried really hard to be a good brother to Debbie, Carl, and Liam. But he never had to try with Ian and Fiona.

When the boys were in middle school, a nasty rumor about Fiona and Mike McGuire made its way to the lunch room. He still remembered the angry pink smudges that blossomed on Ian’s cheeks when he’d heard the whispered filth. Lip hadn’t caught the full story until much later, but he knew that if it was bad enough to make Ian angry, then it was bad enough for them to do something about it.

That day they cut class early for the first time and ran straight to the high school. When the bell rang they made a bee line for McGuire, no real plan in mind. But Ian was quick and Lip was scrappy, so they landed enough hits to make the douche bag look like a pussy for getting beat by middle school kids. Fiona had dragged them away by their ears and yelled at them until she was choking on her laughter. She bought them ice cream at the corner store and acted like having to finish it before they got home was their punishment.

“How will I know if I’m dating a tool?” Debbie had asked Lip once.

Without any hesitation he’d answered. “You’ll figure it out. Or, we’ll beat the shit out of him for you.”

He and Ian hadn’t been speaking then, but he’d included him in the threat because that was just the way things were. If Lip needed to kick the shit out of someone, then Ian needed to kick the shit out of someone. If someone was hunting down Ian, they were hunting down Lip. Fiona would step up to bat for them too if need be, but she expect them to take care of each other before it got to that point. They watched out for each other so that she could watch out for the others.

Lip always thought he was good at taking care of Ian. 

With his wide innocent eyes and floppy red hair, Ian was easy. He followed Lip around and asked too many questions but, he was easy. Sometimes Lip would watch his friends with their younger brothers and feel a rush of pride. His brother was better. His brother was his best friend. That realization had been embarrassing for all of five seconds before he figured out how lucky he was. Other people seemed lonely sometimes. But Lip was never lonely, not when Ian was there. 

“Name a single time I’ve let you down,” he’d said once. Because, Ian wasn’t always there anymore, hadn’t been in a long time and it scared Lip. 

Ian was easy to look out for until he wasn’t anymore. Suddenly he was gay, and screwing a married man. His boyfriend was shooting his fuck buddy and people were going to jail. It was like he saved up all the shit he could possibly get into and let it hit the fan at once. Lip hated it because he didn’t have any real answers, and Ian didn’t even look to him for them anymore. 

“Hey Lip?” Ian called out one night, his voice swimming through the dark of the room.

“Hmm…” he’d replied sleepily.

There was a pause before Ian finally whispered a reply. “Thanks,” he’d said. 

When Lip asked what he was thanking him for, his only answer was thick silence. 

It was hard for him to admit at first, because he was older and shouldn’t have needed his little brother so damn much. But he did need Ian. More than that, he needed Ian to need him.

**. . .**

No one ever blinked an eye when Ian would sneak in late.

He knew it was because he was good at pretending that everything was fine. He was good at smiling or shrugging, convincing people that what they saw was real. Ian never meant to distance himself from his family, he just felt different. He felt different in a way that he couldn’t explain, like it was ingrained in his DNA. That feeling found a name in the form of bastard and fag. He was the Gallagher that didn’t belong to Frank, and the boy who liked other boys. Both were secrets to the world, but not to him and not to his family. 

“I’m gay,” he had told Fiona.

She hadn’t looked surprised or upset, only tired. She always looked tired. “I know,” she’d nodded. It was the best answer she could have given, and the only one he hadn’t been expecting.

Fiona was good at accepting Ian. Whatever he had to offer she took and held, and loved. 

Lip was good at being an asshole. Ian hadn’t realized that until he was eleven and had a mouth full of toilet bowl water. He’d been scrubbing his tongue with a toothbrush and glaring at Lip’s reflection in the mirror when it really hit him. His big brother was an asshole. It had bothered him for less than two days. Then Lip was swinging an arm around his shoulders and throwing rocks at the thirteen year old that had tripped him. 

It didn’t matter if Lip was an asshole. He was still Ian’s favorite person in the whole world.

“You know, if you brought that paternity test to court, Fiona could probably get custody of you no problem,” Lip had mused sitting next to Ian on the hard group home bed. “You could get out of this place.” 

“Don’t be an idiot,” he’d sighed. What he really meant was, not without you.

Ian remembered a lot of things from when he was a kid. He remembered the stupid lessons Lip had tried to teach him and sappy advice from Fiona. But the thing he remembered most was what it meant to be a Gallagher. You fuck with one Gallagher, you fuck with them all. In his mind the words didn't play like an echo, like something that had been said to him. Instead they were a feeling, a deep seeded part of who he was.

Ian felt different sometimes, like he was living two lives and neither one fit quite right. But then he would look at Lip and Fiona, he’d think of toilet bowl water and blood on the kitchen floor. 

Even if his life was shit sometimes, he knew where he belonged. Under Lip’s shoulder, wrapped in Fiona’s arms, right behind one and two...


End file.
